Boar Island Read online

  “Shouldn’t we get her some clothes first?” Paulette asked plaintively.

  The toe of Denise’s sneaker twitched out and struck the downed woman in the shoulder.

  “Don’t kick her!” Paulette exclaimed.

  Like that was worse than drugging and snatching her.

  Denise made no reply. She hadn’t meant to kick her. Her foot had jerked out of its own accord. Nerves.

  “We can lend her some of our clothes,” Denise said. “She won’t need much. She won’t be there for long. Help me pick her up.”

  Paulette didn’t move. She was looking past the naked ranger toward the housing area. “Maybe we should go back to her room. She’s going to need some things. Maybe she takes medication … and toothpaste … that kind of thing,” Paulette said.

  Denise thought about that for an instant—not the meds or the toiletries, a blanket to cover her up. Anna had made it fifty or sixty yards from her apartment. There was nothing but open road and parking lot between where she lay and her bed. A sculptor up late smoking dope, or doing whatever sculptors did in the dead of night, might see them. “Too risky,” she decided. “I’ll take her arms, you take her legs. Put a hand under each knee; it’ll be easier that way.”

  Paulette tiptoed gingerly around the crumpled form on the paving stones. Leaning down, she lifted one of the booted feet and pulled the leg. With the leverage, the senseless woman rolled to lie upon her back, hair veiling her breasts. Half of her face was covered in a black mask. Denise stared until she realized that it was not a mask; it was blood.

  “She’s bleeding!” Paulette exclaimed. “Why is she bleeding?”

  To Denise, it sounded as if her sister blamed her, suggested she’d kicked Anna Pigeon in the face. Her toe had only just tapped the woman’s shoulder. “She must have cut her head when she fell,” Denise said curtly. “Get her legs.” Moving briskly to give herself more courage and authority than she felt, Denise grabbed a limp wrist in each hand and lifted the upper body.

  The used syringe fell from Anna’s lax fingers. Denise dropped the hands. Flesh thudded against the ground.

  “Careful,” Paulette whispered. “We don’t want to hurt her.”

  Denise grunted. Stepping on the needle, she pried the plastic up until the needle snapped off. She put the syringe in the front pocket of her jacket. Both she and Paulette had worn surgical gloves when they filled it; still, forensics would be able to tell what drugs were used, maybe match them to the rufies missing from the park’s evidence locker. If anybody even thought to check there. The syringe itself might be a special kind Mount Desert used exclusively. One never knew what mattered and what didn’t until it was too late.

  The bit of evidence secured, Denise grabbed Anna’s wrists again and whispered, “Grab her legs.”

  Paulette grabbed the top of the boots and pulled Anna’s naked legs up and apart. A whimper escaped her as she slowly lowered them again, boot heels carefully together. “I can’t!” she wailed softly. “It’s like rape. Please, let’s get her some clothes. Or put her back in her bed and leave. She won’t remember us. You said she won’t remember anything.”

  Denise wanted to lash out at Paulette, but a part of her felt as her sister did. Not about putting Ranger Pigeon back and pretending it never happened, but about one woman prying apart another woman’s legs and stepping between them when that woman was naked. It was icky. The worst kind of icky, the kind that stuck to the inside of your skull for years.

  “Right,” she said to herself; then, to her sister, “But we can’t go back. We’re way beyond that. We can’t leave her. Let’s do this. Come take an arm. We’ll drag her so her feet stay together and we’re not … you know, looking at her that way. We don’t have to drag her far. Jumping out of bed and chasing us, she did half our work for us. Another couple hundred yards and we’re good to go. All the hard part over.”

  Paulette came up beside Denise but made no move to help. Denise shoved one of Pigeon’s arms into her hands.

  “Ranger Pigeon was nice to me the morning Kurt was found,” Paulette said, looking into the bloody mask of a face.

  Denise heard faint accusation in her sister’s tone and bit back a harsh response. Paulette was her gentler self; she had to respect the Paulette half of her personality even when it was a huge pain in the butt. “Everything is going to be fine,” she said calmly. “We’ve come so far. We do this and we’re almost free. Think of our house in the pines somewhere warm. Think of being a family and never being cold or alone again.”

  Paulette took in a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “You’re right.”

  Denise exhaled in relief. “Here we go,” she whispered.

  Both of them pulling moved the body at a snail’s pace. Anna Pigeon couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds, a hundred and fifteen at most, yet she apparently had made a deal with gravity; the earth seemed to hold her fast. Agonizing minutes passed as they dragged her from the granite apron in front of the Education Center onto the road to Schoodic Point, where the boat was stashed.

  “Shit,” Denise muttered as one of Anna’s boots came off. Half a yard more and her heel was red with blood. Or, in the moonlight, black with blood. Denise was imagining the red color.

  “We have to stop,” Paulette said. “We’re scratching her bottom and her legs all up.”

  “We’re making a ton of noise,” Denise said. Dumb and Dumber move a body, she thought. Murder wasn’t glamorous; she knew that from killing Kurt. Neither was kidnapping, but it shouldn’t be stupid. This was stupid, like a bad movie.

  For an awful moment, Denise flew free of her body. From twenty feet up in the air she looked down at herself and her sister dragging the drugged ranger. They were ludicrous, absurd. Minuscule black ants, intent on abduction, hauling along a naked human. Insane. The picture whirled, and Denise crashed back into her own skull.

  Not absurd, necessary.

  Okay, absurd, but necessary, Denise admitted to herself. They had to do this to get what was owed them. She was sorry about Anna Pigeon, but Anna would have sided with the Peter Barneses and the Kurt Duffys and stripped Denise and her twin of everything. Again. Thrown them out to rot with the garbage. Again.

  On second thought, she wasn’t that sorry about Anna Pigeon. She should have kept her nosy little pigeon beak out of things that were none of her business, kept her beady little birdy eyes off of other people’s things.

  “Let’s get her up,” Denise said as she dragged the ranger’s limp arm around her neck, hoisting her half of the inert form. “Like this, like we’re walking a drunk. Then we won’t be scratching her. It’ll be okay. Put her arm around your neck.” After more fumbling clown antics, they had the unconscious woman between them and were moving forward. Denise cursed herself. Anybody with half a brain would have worked all this bullshit out before doing the deed. The pigeon was to blame. If she hadn’t nosed around they wouldn’t be in such a rush, moving too fast to think things through properly.

  With Anna draped around their necks, they traveled at a fairly good pace. Pigeon’s toes dragged, but there was nothing Denise could do about that.

  Within minutes they had trundled their catch over the rough cobble-sized stones of the point to the wash where they’d hidden the runabout. Unseen. Unheard. Like they’d never been to Schoodic. Like none of it had ever happened.

  “We’re good, we’re good,” Denise gasped, breathing in gusts as much from fear as exercise. Together they lowered the body, laying it out on the stones. “Catch your breath,” Denise told her sister. “Almost done.” Leaving Paulette standing over their captive, Denise went to turn the runabout right side up. The boat and outboard motor were heavy, but, unlike handling dead humans, Denise was accustomed to handling the runabout. She pried it up onto her knees, then flipped it easily over onto its keel.

  Looking back over the gunwales, she expected to see Paulette getting the pigeon ready to drag over the side and into the boat. Instead, Paulette was sitting on t
he ground, in the rocks, her palms held to her cheeks and her feet in front of her like a little kid.

  “We can’t do it,” Paulette said, eyes fixed on the prone naked ranger. “The shed won’t be a good prison. She’ll get out. Everybody will be swarming the island looking for her. Kidnapping is a serious crime. We could get the death sentence.”

  Like murder wasn’t a serious crime—but then, Paulette hadn’t murdered anybody. Denise had.

  “How can we can we keep her quiet, even for a day or two?” Paulette wailed, her voice rising too high, too loud. “Hikers and tourists go in the woods, they could hear. Handcuffed, how can she get to the toilet? Feed herself? If we do it, she’ll see us. Or hear us. We should have thought this through. Keeping her drugged all that time could hurt her. She could OD or dehydrate or something. I won’t.”

  Paulette sounded mulish. More than that. She sounded firm.

  What a miserable time for my sister to develop a spine, Denise thought. What a miserable time to get a conscience. Rage of the kind she thought she only held for Peter and his ilk rose up in her gorge hot as lava.

  Paulette was staring up at her beseechingly, the ruined blond hair wisping out from beneath the black ball cap. Though they had been born only minutes, maybe seconds, apart, Denise realized Paulette was much younger than she was. Denise had to take care of her. You didn’t rage at a child. Especially not if that child was you when you were little, back before they ruined you. Besides, Paulette was right. A nutcase who would run after you naked with a gun wasn’t a person who would be easy to keep as a pet for an hour, let alone a couple of days.

  Swallowing the molten anger, Denise walked around to where her sister sat beside Anna Pigeon. Crouching, she lifted one of Pigeon’s arms, then laid two fingers over the pulse point at her wrist. For thirty seconds she concentrated. Having laid the hand back on the stones, she shifted, put her first and second finger on the ranger’s trachea, and let them slide down into the hollow where the jugular vein was closest to the skin. Again she concentrated on feeling for a pulse.

  It was there, thready and faint.

  Making an executive decision, Denise removed her hand.

  “Too late, Paulette,” she said. “She’s dead. You killed her.”

  “Oh God,” Paulette murmured, and began to rock back and forth.

  Denise sat next to her and put her arms around her. “Shh, shh,” she whispered. “It’s all good. This is how it was meant to be. I killed Kurt; you injected the pigeon and it killed her. That’s how it had to be. We did nothing that wasn’t supposed to happen. Things are just happening to help us now instead of hurt us. I’m going to take care of everything. No need to worry. Shh.” She laid her cheek against her sister’s. Paulette was calming at her touch. Denise savored the sensation of being of use, of value, to another human being.

  “Are we done?” Paulette sniffed.

  “Almost,” Denise said. “I just need to find a garbage bag.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  There was sensation of a sort. Anna didn’t know if it was life, death, dreams, or something altogether different. As in a dream, occurrences that would have been staggeringly bizarre to the waking mind, felt ordinary.

  Zen.

  That thought wafted through the utter darkness inside Anna’s skull. In dreams one was truly in the moment: no worries for the future, no regrets from the past, no expectations, therefore no surprises. The entire universe created in the mind, and the mind created in that universe.

  A sliding sensation followed by a hard whack to the small of her back startled Anna free of philosophy. Pain was real and actual. Pain made a person care, and damn quick, what was going to happen next, and what had happened a second ago. Pain meant she wasn’t dead and she wasn’t dreaming. Life was happening.

  Further than that, she couldn’t fathom. “Breathe,” she told herself.

  ABCs: airway, blood, circulation. Breathing was first. Of course she was breathing. Alive, one did that sort of thing. But it wasn’t easy. Almost, she had to tell her diaphragm to drop, her lungs to expand. Not an out-of-body experience; more a trapped-in-a-worthless-body experience.

  As consciousness and breath fluttered in and out, pictures came back fleetingly: the jab, the wasp, the chase. Like old Polaroids, colors were muted and images fading like ghosts at sunrise.

  Shadows had come to her room and pricked her arm. She had chased the shadows. Now she was blind and couldn’t move. By the slick fabric clinging to her face, and the faint rubbery smell, she guessed she was in a big plastic sack. So, perhaps not blind, merely temporarily unable to see.

  Drugged. Paralyzed. In a sack.

  But not scared or unhappy. To the contrary, Anna felt fairly chipper. The drug, though powerful and paralyzing, had potential as a recreational drug. Nice of her kidnappers to think of her feelings. For a moment, Anna felt warm and fuzzy toward her shadows.

  Then one of them stomped on her ankle. Roaring filled her ears. The two happenings were unrelated. The roar was an engine. Her sack and she were in a boat, or had been dumped in the backseat of a car. Boat. No car had that high whiny sound. A go-cart maybe.

  Who kidnapped anybody with a go-cart?

  For a while Anna faded. She knew she existed, she knew she was cold, but she had little opinion regarding these things. On some level she knew she was in deep trouble. People were not drugged and bagged and carted out to sea in a go-cart unless they were going to be disposed of.

  Oddly, she didn’t care overmuch.

  Then the whining growl of the engine was gone. Anna’s mind rose from the depths as if the harsh noise had been holding it under. Silence was a balm. Opening her mouth, she tried to breathe it in. Plastic stuck to her lips and tongue. Hands grabbed at her, latex screeching on plastic as fingers plucked and slipped on her shroud, then pinched and clutched, trying for better purchase. Heavy breathing and grunts filtered through the bag, but no voices. Not that it mattered. There would be no harm in her identifying the voices. The dead tell no tales and all that.

  Dead. That sounded so melodramatic.

  Anna would have liked to fight, just to say she had, that she’d gone down swinging and taken a few of the bastards with her, but she was unable to lift a hand or make her lips form a word.

  As she was manhandled up to where her belly pressed hard against the gunwale, the boat rocked dangerously. Just as she was thinking how grand it would be if it capsized, and her shadows had to escort her to Davy Jones’s locker, her head plunged into the cold. Plastic form-fitted itself around her mouth and nose, and she couldn’t breathe.

  Another heave and the rest of her followed out of the boat. Every inch of Anna was pressed with cold plastic. The ocean was too cold. Anna didn’t want to die in the cold. Maybe she’d suffocate or die of hypothermia before she drowned.

  “It’s not sinking,” came a shrill voice.

  Well, that was good news.

  In the fetal position inside the garbage bag, Anna felt the sea roll her onto her back; then she spun weightless into the sucking cold.

  “There she goes,” a calmer voice said.

  Not much of an epitaph, Anna thought.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  They motored back to Somes Sound, Paulette as uncommunicative and dark as a lump of coal in the bow of the boat, Denise’s mind fixated on Ranger Pigeon’s demise. Not her drowning or suffocating or ODing or whatever finally took her out, but how weighty deadweight was. Manhandling the body was much harder than she would have believed. In the gym, Denise could bench press her own weight, one hundred twenty-five pounds—or could when she was in her early thirties. Yet moving a soon-to-be-dead body that weighed a bit less than that had been backbreaking, even though there were two of them doing the manhandling. Dead—or deadish—people were denser than living people, physically speaking, and just as uncooperative.

  Denise was glad that the killing portion of her new life was at an end—maybe at an end. One thing did tend to lead to another. Obstacles would always pop
up when one least expected it. Kurt had been a given, but the Pigeon thing, that was extemporaneous. Either way, Denise had reached the conclusion that killing people was more work than it was worth in a lot of ways. Hitler probably would have won World War II if he hadn’t wasted so much time and energy killing people who didn’t need killing.

  Kurt had needed it. That hadn’t made it any easier. Anna Pigeon hadn’t needed it; things just got away from them, choices lopped off, until killing her was the only good one left. That didn’t make it any easier.

  Paulette, too, wasn’t making things any easier. Denise watched her sitting in a heap as the boat cut neatly through the gentle swells. Paulette was more delicate than Denise had thought anyone who shared her DNA could be. It must be that nature made them both the same, but nurture had toughened Denise up. Nurture for Denise had been a brutal series of beatings and betrayals. Of course Paulette had been abused by her husband. Probably she was too old by then for the abuse to have any effect other than beating her down, Denise thought, whereas she—what? Had been beaten up?

  However it worked, it was obvious that the removal of Anna Pigeon, though it had given them more time—a day, maybe a day and a half—had been harder on Paulette than it had been on her. Maybe it had broken some bit of her sister that could compromise the plan. Denise sensed that waiting while feds, rangers, and whoever else swarmed around looking for the missing Pigeon would be a bad idea. Paulette would fold under the pressure. Denise didn’t like to think it, but she herself might have issues. Her nerves, once as strong as steel cables, had begun to fray. Age might account for it. Or Peter Barnes. Everything. Not that she’d fold under pressure, but she might explode. Either would mean disaster.

  Time, in this case, would not heal all. It was a bomb. Denise could feel it ticking. Paulette or Fate or dumb luck was going to trigger the explosion soon. That this was so was felt in her viscera, as palpable as an electric current. Even with Pigeon out of the picture, things would have to be moved up. Way up. The sale of the Duffy shack, the so-called legacy, and family.